Author Archive

Dumbarse ports management and owners

Written By: - Date published: 11:24 am, March 7th, 2012 - 278 comments

Today Ports of Auckland  sacked 292 employees in the pursuit of the unobtainable by the idiotic. The Ports of Auckland from the start intended to provide a conflict with the intent of sacking all the workers and rehiring them on worse conditions, saving $6m (20%) in wages a year. The amount of money saved was a pittance compared to the underlying problems the port needs to fix.

The biggest party are non-voters.

Written By: - Date published: 4:06 pm, February 24th, 2012 - 25 comments

The option that most eligible voters in NZ supported in 2011 was “don’t vote”.  Nearly 7% didn’t enroll, and if enrolled then more than 25% didn’t vote.  Of the eligible voters from the 2006 census, over 30% didn’t vote at all. And since 2006 the voting population has almost certainly increased. It means that National’s large vote is probably less than the biggest “party”. Not a particularly good mandate unless you’re as deluded as John Key.

Fran O’Sullivan will be distressed over Crafar decision.

Written By: - Date published: 5:36 pm, February 15th, 2012 - 64 comments

Now there is a surprise (not). The Crafar farms sale doesn’t conform to the economic benefits required under the Overseas Investment Act.  Fran O’Sullivan is going to be distressed. The decision by the OIO and government was not in conformance with the the Overseas Investment Act. Fran waffled about everything except what was required by the Act – as our “anonymous” authors pointed out and were abused for doing so by Fran.

Journalists – pah!

Site health – comments and posts

Written By: - Date published: 4:31 pm, February 12th, 2012 - 36 comments

vto made a comment that he thought that the number of comments was diminishing at kiwiblog. Now I have no idea because I usually avoid the sewer section there. However it did remind me that I should have a look here. It feels like it has been getting more popular, but intuition is a poor substitute for actually looking at the numbers.

John Key’s emergency descent

Written By: - Date published: 11:22 am, February 12th, 2012 - 15 comments

A great graphic from the Sunday Star Times as John Key starts dropping towards a hard landing in the personal popularity stakes. And in the great tradition of  journalists everywhere, the rest of the article is about how he is still preferred by rubber fetishists.

Fran O’Sullivan: a shill with diversions

Written By: - Date published: 2:02 pm, February 5th, 2012 - 216 comments

Fran O’Sullivan took objection to RedLogix criticizing her articles on Crafar farms. It helps our traffic, but really she should relook at the utter crap she has been writing before attacking the questioner. She talks about everything except why the OIO within their legislation limited framework should or should not have approved the sale. The more that I reread her work on this subject, the more I ask: what in the hell is she trying to hide?

Outage

Written By: - Date published: 9:56 am, February 1st, 2012 - 33 comments

There was some maintenance done on the main NZ server last night. All looked ok when I went to sleep at about 6am, but appears to have started having problems from about 8:30 onwards with intermittently waiting on some network resource. Problem looks external to my server and the server’s support staff are chasing it […]

Teapot tattle

Written By: - Date published: 2:25 pm, January 26th, 2012 - 122 comments

The Teapot Tapes have leaked on to the internet.

You can torrent it and listen past all of the noise.

Funding the puppets of denial

Written By: - Date published: 12:11 pm, January 25th, 2012 - 12 comments

There have been some interesting investigations going on into the funding of denier lobby groups. The reluctance of them to disclose their sources of income is becoming an issue. What can be seen is that they have  very publicity shy funding sources. Most likely it is those who stand to lose money if effective measures are taken to reduce the impact of climate changes. So they want transparency in science and hypocrisy on their own funding of their own ‘independent’ mouthpieces.

US Congress gets a Darwin award

Written By: - Date published: 5:19 pm, January 19th, 2012 - 7 comments

Darwin awards goes dark

The idiots at the US Congress, after covering themselves with shame in 2011, have already started to try to surpass it this year with dumbarse legislation against online copyright piracy. Not only will it not prevent the crimes of its intended targets,  but it is also so badly drafted that almost anything can and probably will be deemed to be a copyright violation. Good choice for a Darwin award. The only problem is that most of them have already bred.

The problems of pBooks

Written By: - Date published: 12:01 pm, January 13th, 2012 - 30 comments

My iPad was powerless, so for the first time in a month I reached into the vast numbers of pBooks that litter our shelves and are going to be a real pain to move in a month, and tried to start to read one.  I looked at the video of instructions from the 14th century and while that showed me what side to open it from. But where was …….

Ports of Auckland wage numbers

Written By: - Date published: 9:05 pm, January 11th, 2012 - 137 comments

There has been some interesting material floating around in comments and on facebook about the Ports of Auckland waterside disputing workers wages. Looks like we are starting to get some more information outside of the right wing nut job sites. Ultimately the information has to be provided by the Ports of Auckland because they are the only organisation that holds the wages data across employees. But the figures provided by the P0A (the 91k)  include overtime payments, shift payments, superannuation subsidies, medical insurance subsidies and hardly constitute a normal wage that the employee would see..

Post-xmas blues

Written By: - Date published: 1:58 pm, January 6th, 2012 - 15 comments

My blobbed out and weight gaining holiday in sunny Southland  is over. I’m back at work and feeling like an early day. Generally I have the post-Xmas blues and a couple of kilos that I need to wear off. But this came up on my playlist at work…. Yeah right

Tax-take bullshit

Written By: - Date published: 11:26 am, January 2nd, 2012 - 104 comments

An earlier post by Mike Smith on inequality referred to a claim by Geoff Vincent that 12% of the taxpayers were paying 49% of the the taxes. Now this was patently a spinners interpolation on the tax data and shouldn’t be part of the debate.. A comment by DH has a look at that bullshit. […]

Self inflicted injury

Written By: - Date published: 11:29 pm, December 30th, 2011 - 31 comments

FFS: If you are going to confess your foibles to Facebook, then don’t let a low-grade sociopath have access to your dribblings. Not only is it going to be embarrassing to you after you sober up. But you are going to find that every other border line nutter has liked it all over the net. A few simple rules when you are sober will prevent the problem.

Myths and moralising – the conservative trademark

Written By: - Date published: 2:17 pm, December 29th, 2011 - 36 comments

Even smart conservatives in my experience generally  think far too short term, fail to look at history  and in the final analysis view everything from their own narrow interests rather than those of society as whole. They prefer historical mythmaking and moralizing about others rather than thinking. The Economist throws up another telling example by David Brooks.

Comment Privacy and fools

Written By: - Date published: 12:04 pm, December 19th, 2011 - 94 comments

Cameron Slater is a technological idiot. Well he has just proven it again. A comment on our site referred to IP/e-mail matching at another site. In his own guilt about privacy abuses Slater immediately jumped to the wrong conclusion.

I’d advise people to never put comments on sites that lack a privacy policy that is explicit about what information may be used for. But we ensure your privacy here.

I am going to miss the real Aaron Gilmore

Written By: - Date published: 3:06 pm, December 10th, 2011 - 6 comments

The body of Aaron Gilmore will be leaving Parliament. However the divine rapture of the presence of “Aaron Gilmore for Prime Minister” will linger long after after that pretender to the name has gone.

Read the wisdom that is Facebook on the blessed one.

Auckland candidates meeting moved

Written By: - Date published: 3:57 pm, December 9th, 2011 - 25 comments

Due to the huge amount of interest in Sunday’s meet the leadership candidates meeting the venue has changed to a larger venue.

I can’t say that I am surprised. There have been more inches written about these meetings than any political meeting that I can remember since Orewa I, especially in the blogs.

Defending Nanaia Mahuta?

Written By: - Date published: 8:58 pm, December 4th, 2011 - 33 comments

I’m afraid that I don’t know much about Nanaia Mahuta. In fact probably way less than I should have, bearing in mind that she stayed in the Labour and didn’t decamp over the Foreshore and Seabed. But there was this post “in support of nanaia” at the Hand Mirror that I found interesting so I’m quoting a […]

Rugby World Cup cramps politics

Written By: - Date published: 3:00 pm, December 2nd, 2011 - 35 comments

One of the more interesting observations about this election campaign has been the effect of having the rugby world cup on the political process and therefore on our political blog stats. They were really crammed into the last two months and disrupted by big games.

“Blog king” no more

Written By: - Date published: 9:38 am, December 2nd, 2011 - 80 comments

Well we have just moved out of the election month, and we’re now getting the gradual fall back of readership and posts. About the only growth around NZ at present is in political blogging.

I’m happy to say that we now appear to consistently be either level pegging with Kiwiblog or exceeding their totals for a number of months. Since we have been ‘advised’ many times that this would never happen, I’m finding that it is rather more satisfying than I expected.

Parker withdrawing

Written By: - Date published: 5:20 pm, December 1st, 2011 - 314 comments

David Parker has withdrawn from the leadership race of the Labour party according to Stuff. Predictably Kiwiblog, Stuff, and probably the other right-wing media fools are using this as an opportunity to hype up David Shearer as an easier opponent for John Key. It is not for nothing that David Farrar has “Fomenting Happy Mischief […]

Victim tales of the right

Written By: - Date published: 3:40 pm, November 29th, 2011 - 26 comments

Nationals yapping poodles here were doing it during the election by calling Labour “nasty” in violation of any level of common sense. John Key and teabags. In the US similar supporters are calling Obama nasty for pointing out a lying political ad by Mitt Romney.

Don’t ya know the right are always the poor victims… I just tend to find them to be whining dickheads. But I am actually trying to be nasty.

Islands in a sea of blue

Written By: - Date published: 1:59 pm, November 28th, 2011 - 25 comments

Moira Coatsworth is looking at a review of what worked and what didn’t this election. I’d participate, but I’ve long since found that the internal communications of the NZLP are too sclerotic to pass operational information through. Quite simply the message gets munged by political types with limited understanding of electorate campaigns long before it gets to the people who need to hear it – the mechanics in other electorates.

My views on one thing that does work – concentrating on electorate canvassing data.

Time – last chance for comments

Written By: - Date published: 11:45 pm, November 25th, 2011 - 5 comments

We’re not posting posts and not allowing comments from 2359 tonight to 1900 tomorrow after the polls close.

Thanks everyone….

Epsom voters: Please kill Act – you know you want to…

Written By: - Date published: 12:45 pm, November 25th, 2011 - 21 comments

For the sake of your neighbors in Auckland and your extended family throughout New Zealand, could the voters of Epsom please terminate the twitching corpse of the Act party. Once they may have had a purpose. Now they just have John Banks and that other failed politician. Let us look forward into the sunset without this zombie party being maintained by the misplaced charity of the voters of Epsom.

Vote for MMP, anything else is just crazy

Written By: - Date published: 6:51 am, November 24th, 2011 - 40 comments

I see that the Nats in drag anti-MMP campaign have brought space on our banner. Now I know the mood of the authors on this subject.  They’d like MMP with tweaks – which will happen in 2014.

I looked at the anti’s pathetic ad, and decided that it was more effective to take their money, counter it (like the Standards enhanced logo?) and comment on it.

Search warrants against the media

Written By: - Date published: 7:17 pm, November 17th, 2011 - 57 comments

Interesting looking at the current law on getting and using search warrants on media organisations. There are some quite clear guidelines from a 1965 case.If the guidelines are adhered to it is hard to see how warrants could be obtained. Reading and publishing the search warrants and the supporting materials looks to be the only way that the public will be able to decide if John Key is walking down the path of close cooperation between the police and the current prime minister used by other ‘democratic’ countries.

Was it a full moon?

Written By: - Date published: 1:02 pm, November 10th, 2011 - 61 comments

Oh hell. My worst fears have been realized. John Key is a wereperson. He is morphing into an incantation of the countries biggest ever political disaster. And talking of other story lines from True Blood. John Banks has been wandering around with the decapitated head of Don Brash.

My images of Rena

Written By: - Date published: 1:15 pm, October 14th, 2011 - 20 comments

From my facebook. Some opportunistic bugger is trying to offload their boat. TomScott in Weellington does his cogent best as does the Herald cartoonist. Then there is my favorite (despite its grammar error).